It is imperative in today's highly competitive commercial environment that products reach the marketplace quickly and efficiently. This is especially important for products such as food products, particularly when such products are of the perishable variety. With due consideration to today's security-conscious environment, it is also imperative that such products are assured safe and secure transport to the final destinations thereof, such that tampering and theft are effectively prevented. Finally, it is imperative that effective accountability of each product in the distribution process occur, to assure that the end customer receives and pays for the correct goods he/she has purchased.
The invention defined herein is useful for tracking other goods than simply food products, and is thus not limited thereto. The teachings herein are equally applicable to receiving and distribution of all sorts of goods, including electronic packaging components (e.g., printed circuit boards and cards, chip carriers, etc.), electronic components (e.g., computers, servers, etc.), and a multitude of others of many different sizes and shapes. As defined herein, the invention is also applicable to effective receipt and distribution of both large and small quantities of such goods, and of goods of many different cost levels.
Tracking and identifying quantities of goods during a storage and/or distribution process has presented a significant challenge for both industry and science. For example, the demands of keeping track of consumer products, such as food products, jewelry, and the like, and the strong interest in effective identification devices (perhaps the most classic today being credit/debit cards with personal photo identification thereon), has led to the need for a secure, relatively fast, yet readily inexpensive to operate, tracking system such as taught in the aforementioned pending application. Additionally, emerging technologies such as combinatorial chemistry, genomics research, and microfluidics also require the ability to identify and track the location of large numbers of items, especially in the science industry and other industries shipping goods such as chemicals, powders, and the like.
A well known procedure for tracking the location and/or identity of goods is the utilization of Universal Product Code (UPC) technology, or, as also known, “barcode” technology. Barcodes use a linear array of elements that are either printed directly on goods or on labels that are affixed to the goods, typically in the form of a decal or the like (some of more recent vintage are printed as part of the package container). These barcode elements typically comprise bars and spaces, with bars of varying widths representing strings of binary “ones” and spaces of varying widths representing strings of binary “zeros”. Barcodes can be detectable optically using devices such as scanning laser beams or handheld wands, or these can be implemented in magnetic media. The readers and scanning systems electro-optically decode the symbol to multiple alpha-numerical characters that are intended to be descriptive of the article or some characteristic thereof. Such characters are typically represented in digital form as an input to a data processing system for applications such as in point-of-sale processing and inventory control, these latter two being only examples of many such applications. Traditional barcodes usually contain 15 or less digits but are not limited to this number if the length of the overall label allows more to be used. However, two dimensional bar codes have also been developed in which one-dimensional bar codes are stacked with horizontal guard bars between these to increase the information density. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,304,786 describes the use of a high density two-dimensional bar code symbol for use in bar code applications.
A different form or technology that has been developed for labeling objects includes a composition comprising silicon or silicon dioxide microparticles and a powder, fluid or gas to be applied to goods such as vehicles, credit cards and jewelry (see foreign patent WO 95/29437 for a description of such usage). This system typically allows the formation of several million particles on a single wafer, each of the particles on one wafer being designed to be of identical shape and size so that when the particles are freed from the wafer substrate one is left with a suspension containing a single particle type which can thus be identified and associated with a particular item (good).
Still another, yet more recent, technology is combinatorial chemistry which has also resulted in the development of various encoding schemes (See, for example, Czarnik, A. W., “Encoding Methods for Combinatorial Chemistry”, Curr. Opin. Chem. Biol., 1997, 1, 60). The need for this development has arisen in part from the split and pool technique utilized in combinatorial chemistry to generate libraries on the order of one million compounds. Split and pool synthesis involves dividing a collection in beads into N groups, where N represents the number of different reagents being used in a particular reaction stage, and after the reaction is performed, pooling all of these groups together and repeating the split and pool process until the desired reaction sequence is completed. Clearly, in order to keep track of each of the compounds produced from a reaction series, the beads must be “tagged” or encoded with information at each stage to enable identification of the compound of interest or the reaction pathway producing the compound. The tags used to encode the information, however, must be robust to the conditions being employed in the chemical synthesis and must be easily identifiable to obtain the information. Exemplary encoding techniques that have been developed include the use of chemically robust small organic molecules (“tags”) that are cleaved from the bead after the synthesis is completed and analyzed using mass spectroscopy (see U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,565,324 and 5,721,099 for descriptions of this technology). Radio frequency (RF) encoded combinatorial chemistry is also known and combines recent advances in microelectronics, sensors, and chemistry and uses a single or multiple addressable radiofrequency tag semiconductor unit to record encoding and other relevant information along the synthetic pathway (Nicolaou et al, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 1995, 34, 2289).
Still another example of on-bead decoding includes the use of colored and fluorescent beads (Egner et al., Chem. Commun. 1997, 735), in which a confocal microscope laser system is used to obtain the fluorescence spectra of fluorescent dyes.
As understood from the following, the present invention provides a new and unique device which utilizes RF identification to track goods, including those of the several different types mentioned hereinabove, and others. The device as defined herein is of relatively simple yet robust construction, may be reusable, and can be operated expeditiously at relatively low cost to assure safe, efficient and secure shipment such that a receiver of the desired goods will know he/she is receiving exactly the type and quantity of goods he/she has requested.
It is believed that such a device will constitute a significant advancement in the art.